R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught politics and sociology for many years. His most recent books are How Long Will South Africa Survive? and Look Back in Laughter: Oxford’s Postwar Golden Age. He lives in Cape Town.

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Don’t you carry?

R.W. Johnson

In Harare to watch Mugabe steal the election I quickly got some reminders I didn’t really need that I wasn’t too welcome. The state-owned media repeatedly declared that foreign spies posing as journalists were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find myself watching a ZTV programme about myself as the evil genius of the whole Zimbabwe crisis. When I told the paper I was writing for they got quite excited: ‘We’ll send a photographer around,’ they said.

‘Christ, don’t do that,’ I said. ‘The last thing I need is to have a mugshot over an article at this point.’

‘Don’t worry,’ they said, ‘it’s only for use if you get put in the slammer. Or for your obit.’

At this stage I decided I’d better go somewhere a bit more defensible, to the little compound of my friend Dave the hunter. Dave’s house was, from that point of view, reassuring: Kalashnikov rounds on the mantelpiece, crossed Martini-Henrys on the wall and pictures of the Pioneer Column, of Selous, the greatest of all hunters, and of First World War fighter aces in the hall. On the floor, a hyena skin, the mouth still gaping wide with carnivorous lust. Across the compound lived Barry, getting on now but still a legendary crocodile hunter. Barry’s wife, Jane, insisted on giving me a haircut as I sat under the giant baobab and listened to Barry. ‘Only got bitten twice by crocs,’ he said, ‘but both times my own stupid fault for just wounding ‘em. A wounded croc is like a wounded tiger, bound to come back and get you.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘When it’s wounded it just closes its eyes and sinks to the bottom, tries to make you think it’s dead.’

‘How do you know when it’s really dead?’ I asked.

‘Can’t miss that,’ says Barry. ‘Shoot one through the brain and they throw themselves round on top of the water: somersaults, handsprings, what have you. The big thing then is to catch hold of its tail or one of its legs while it’s still thrashing about or else it will just die and sink to the bottom and you won’t get the meat or the skin or anything.’

‘Isn’t that a bit risky, I mean catching hold of it when it’s still full of energy?’

‘Not really,’ says Barry. ‘It can’t fake the somersaults: that really does mean you’ve blasted its brain out. It beats the hell out of just wounding it so that it comes back under your boat, knocks you into the water, forcing you to shoot the bugger while it’s trying to eat you. Take my word for it, that can be quite unnerving.’

Dave and Barry both carry guns all the time, small personal revolvers or pistols tightly and invisibly clamped to their bodies. ‘Don’t you carry?’ they ask. Dave talks to me very seriously about the merits of carrying. Given their fascination with guns and the books about the Rhodesian Air Force and the Special Forces of the old South Africa lying round the house, it would be easy to write off Dave and Barry and their white hunting friends as recalcitrant Old Rhodies. But quite wrong. They are all in Africa because, like me, they can’t imagine being anywhere else and have happily embraced majority rule as the only right thing. They speak Shona and SiNdebele just as fluently as their black girlfriends and sometimes, after explosive bursts of laughter, I have to ask lamely for a translation.

Which is not to say there wasn’t something unsettling about several of them. Dave pushed weights every morning and I asked what the big white scar across his shoulder was. ‘Poacher, AK-47,’ he said. ‘He’d just killed an elephant and thought, quite rightly, that I’d turn him in. Damn near took off my shoulder. But I was with Zeno and Zeno nailed him, filled him full of holes. There’s a shoot-to-kill policy with poachers in Zim, and Zeno takes full advantage of that. Helluva good guy but maybe a bit of a psychopath.’

The full text of this diary is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

R.W. Johnson says he went to Zimbabwe to watch Mugabe steal the election (LRB, 25 April). Mostly, though, readers are treated to tales of psychopathic murder and to a shameless celebration of colonial depredation. The narrative line emerges from the scene in the compound belonging to Johnson’s friend, ‘Dave the hunter’: ‘Kalashnikov rounds on the mantelpiece … and pictures of the Pioneer Column, of Selous, the greatest of all hunters … in the hall’. Today, Dave the hunter and his friends Zeno and Jimmy keep up old traditions. Taking full advantage of the shameful shoot-to-kill policy – a policy begun by Ian Smith and continued by Mugabe – Zeno, his ‘passion’ for elephants and rhinos apparently exceeded only by his contempt for African life, has, by Dave the hunter’s count, ‘slotted’ some thirty poachers. Meanwhile Jimmy, the policeman and ex-Rhodesian soldier, pursues another slotting expedition: by his own count, he has coolly murdered 84 alleged rapists and drug-dealers, not one of whom, it seems, was accorded the benefit of a trial, let alone convicted in a court of law. Perhaps Jimmy’s killing spree is justified by Mugabe’s executive lawlessness. A century earlier, Johnson assures us, the European takeover of Africa had ended such anarchy, stamped out cannibalism, and imposed the rule of law. With the end of colonialism, however, life expectancy has gone down while lawlessness, disease, even cannibalism (on Dave the hunter’s authority), are back. I was ready to cancel my LRB subscription. But then I turned the page. There, Richard Gott lays bare the horrors of colonialism as he brilliantly exposes The Oxford History of the British Empire for the whitewashing that it is. The LRB, after all, is capable of self-correction.